Shelley Winters

Shelley Winters
First Seen	Bobbins, 21 Sep 1998 (first Bobbins strip)
Appeared In	Bobbins, Scary Go Round, Bad Machinery
Last Seen	Into the Woods
Gender
Nationality
Occupation	Writer of children's books; lawyer
Past Jobs	barmaid, Hamilton Percy's secretary and caddie, Mayor's assistant, magazine and newspaper reporter, history fixer
Species	human; was zombie for a while; seems to have multiple lives
Family	Erin Winters (Sister) Ed and Carol Winters (Parents) Peggy (Daughter) Two more daughters, to be born after Peggy and before the year 2032
Significant Other	{{{so}}}
Friends	{{{friends}}}
Past Relationships	Bruno Rich Tweedy Rafael Domingeuz Raffles Heroditus Black Metal Simon
Pets	{{{pets}}}

Shelley's file in the Troublemakers Index [1]

Shelley Endeavour Winters is an investigative journalist, mayoral assistant, novelist and the lead character for most of Bobbins and Scary Go Round. She is good friends with Amy Beckwith-Chilton.

Originated in John Allison's Image Comics-inspired superhero drawings of 1994, according to a history feature on the now-defunct original Bobbins archive site. In the story collection Looks, Brains & Everything, John Allison also claimed that Shelley was originally supposed to be a mermaid, hence a name containing the word "shell" and red hair similar to Ariel from the Disney movie.

Shelley grew up in a somewhat rural location (originally portrayed as a farm) on the outskirts of Tackleford, with her parents and younger sister Erin Winters. She attended Griswald's Grammar School along with Ryan Beckwith and Tim Jones, and had a traumatic experience when best friend Mandy Beasant committed suicide (as recounted in Expecting To Fly).

Later, she attended law school, but after graduating, Shelley's lawyer career ended with her first case, due to her turning out to have a pathological fear of judges. Aside from occasionally giving legal advice to her friends (and calling herself a "legal beagle"), said career only got rekindled years later, when she decided to represent Tim when he was on trial for breaking the 2011 Tardis Act - and apparently finally overcoming her fear, she won the case! By 2032, Shelley was (will be?) England & Wales's most successful lawyer.

She worked for the City Limit magazine in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a writer and reporter, and had a number of other jobs after that magazine went under, including working for Tackleford's mayor's office and becoming a reporter once again for the local Tackleford Cormorant newspaper (a position her sister Erin would also later hold). She lost this position after taking a leave to do a freelance magazine article requiring on-location research on Christmas Island which she'd been mistakenly assigned to (actually intended for Shelby Winner), then extending the leave while taking a long vacation with Shelby on the island and then New York (there was reportedly a planned plotline at that point where they got involved with the 2008 US election, but this was cut short), and finally returning to Tackleford to find her boss (Paula) didn't want her back.

Eventually, she got a job offer from the Ministry of History (which came in person prior to her actually posting the CVs), leading to a move to London and some adventures that are being chronicled in Destroy History. She has later recounted this as ending two weeks after her job started, when this agency was eliminated, leaving her once again unemployed; this account, however, is unreliable given that she signed an agreement to have her memory wiped upon leaving the job. At this point she decided to take up authoring books, trying romance writing first before winding up in children's literature. When Shelley's children's book, Tibkins, became a big hit, she became a rich and famous author, and lived in London for a few years before returning to Tackleford. Later, Tim Jones moved in with her, and soon she was pregnant, ultimately giving birth to a daughter, Peggy.[2] Tim had broken up with her by then, but returned after the child was born (not quite making it to the hospital in time for the birth).

For a number of years she (along with the rest of the world) didn't know her sister ever existed, as the memory of her was wiped out upon her being consigned to Hell, but in recent times that memory has returned and they're once again close (when Erin visits Earth in a break from her duties as queen of the underworld).

Still something of a child at heart, she has often hung out with people younger than herself; she contributed a music review column ("Dr. Lady-Sounds") to Sarah Grote's "zine", and mentored Sarah's younger sister Charlotte Grote. She is hardly a simple person, however; she regularly features on the "Troublemakers Index", and has been labeled a Ginger Ninja (and Ginger Genius). She is prone to deciding all of a sudden to pursue some unusual, and previously unknown, interest, such as becoming a witch or obsessing on the menace of the Portuguese Man-o-War or the moon. (which she eventually had to pursue as part of the "Crisis Quests"). She is always prepared to launch a major operation in order to save the world, whenever it may prove necessary.

Shelley seems to have multiple lives (cat-like); she has been murdered and buried, then dug up and turned into a zombie, only to be struck by lightning which turned her fully human again. Later she worked her way out of the underworld in a near-death experience, and has survived some other incidents that would have killed anybody else; this was at one time revealed to be the work of Wee Folk who find her amusing. Another time, the time traveling Scout Jones from the future implied that she was secretly behind all of Shelley's bruises with death, so Shelley's seeming immortality could be due to the grandfather paradox. Her watch once told her that her estimated time of death would be December 4, 2061.[3]

Love Life

Before Shelley and Tim got together for good (a relationship which had its ups and downs, but eventually, he proposed to her), Shelley's rather questionable choice in men was notorious among her peers.[4]

For the first two years of Bobbins, Shelley dated an a boorish, unintelligent man named Bruno, who had loved her back when she was 16 with "bad skin and braces".[5] They first met when Shelley was working as a barmaid, in the summer before she went to university.[6] Bruno later dumped her after discovering she was running a webcam for flu-fetishists. [7]

Other relationships include: her workmate Rich Tweedy [8], the spy Rafael Dominguez (who, shortly after meeting Shelley, got shot by Fallon Young)[9], Raffles, Gentleman Thief [10], and the Atlantean Heroditus (who really shouldn't have "twusted" Shelley).[11] She seems to have had some romantic interest in Ryan Beckwith as well. There was also Black Metal Simon, who left behind some of his spikes and a cape in the trunk of Shelley's car, as seen in Murder She Writes, and which impressed Lottie.

When she was seen as the romantic interest of Len Pickering, this turned out to be within Tim's dream.

When Esther, Susan, and Daisy visited her in London during her time at the Ministry of History (as shown in the Giant Days 2017 Holiday Special), she was seeing Grant Poplar (who worked at an art gallery) and considering taking their relationship to higher levels, but meanwhile neighbor Cecil was also pursuing her, and workmate Sid seemed like he might also be after Shelley, but turned out to actually be going after Esther. Nothing permanent came of any of this.

Trivia

Shelley is sharing her name with a real life celebrity, the quite prolific Hollywood actress Shelley Winters (1920 - 2006). The real Shelley's actual name was Shirley Schrift - which is "coincidentally" also the alias the webcomic Shelley chose upon making contact with Hedy Lamarr, during her trip to 1941 in Destroy History.

When she became housemates with Holly West during her time at City Limit, Shelley claimed to be into "tidying up and prayer" to get around Holly's desire for a housemate not "loopy, scatty, erratic" like her previous (unnamed) housemate.[12] Esther de Groot described her as 5'4". [13]

While pregnant, Shelley was featured in an artistic nude pose on the cover of dRule magazine.[14]

External links

• Tracking the Lusty Life of Shelley, John Allison’s Uncompromising Webcomic Star